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Entries in john cassavetes
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John Cassavetes' 1974 production of A Woman Under the Influence represented the pinnacle of his artistic collaboration with Gena Rowlands. He wrote her one of the most complex and dramatic female roles in cinematic history: Mabel Longhetti, a "mentally unstable" wife to a construction worker, mother of three, Los Angeles housewife. The echoes of time have ensured that her performance, ostensibly an alienating portrayal of a "crazy woman", possesses the characteristics of a far more nuanced individual. In his notes about the production of A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes muses at length about how his relationship with his wife informed the writing of the role, creating a shadow puppet theater of his own life. He begins by describing the differences between himself and Gena.

I know when I was not working, and Gena was working for me, I was a pretty good housewife and everything else. But I didn't really have the same reactions as a woman would have. Mainly because I didn't have to be a housewife the rest of my life. I didn't have to think into the future of when I'd get older or when my attractiveness would fade, or when the kids would grow up or when the baby would cease to cling to you, and you're not really a mother then, and you have to think, well, should I be the friend or should I be the mother?

Gena and I were speaking about the pictures we were going to make, how the roles are so thin and everything is made so a narrative can work. We were talking about how difficult love was and how tough it could be to make a love story about people who were totally different culturally, coming from two different family groups that were diametrically opposed and yet still regarded each other very highly. I kept thinking about that. Gena and I are absolutely dissimilar in everything we think, do and feel.

Beyond that, men and women are totally different. When I started writing the scripts, I kept these things in mind and didn't want the love story easy. I made a lot of discoveries about my own life.

I absolutely wrote A Woman Under the Influence to try to write a terrific part for my wife. Gena wanted to do a play. She was always complaining we're living in California, she loves the theater and everything. Gena really wanted to do a play on Broadway. And I had always fancied that I would write a play. She wanted something big. She said, "Now look, deal with it from a woman's point of view. I mean deal with it so that I have a part in this thing!" and I said, "OK," and I went off and had been thinking about it for a year anyway. And I had taken seven or eight tries at bad plays and came up with this play, which was not the play the movie was, but it was based on the same characters.

And Gena read it and said, no, she wouldn't do it. And I'm very stubborn so I didn't realize that she liked the part but that on the stage, to play that every night, would kill her. I had no concept of that because we're all obsessed, everyone's obsessed, that is, in this stupid thing. And so I wrote another play on the same subject with the same characters, deepening the characters and making it even more difficult to play. And I gave it to Gena and she said, "I like that tremendously. I like the first one too, but I don't think I could do that on Broadway." So I wrote another play, and now there were three plays! And I took them to New York and I got a producer to produce the plays on Broadway and I thought it was a terrific idea to do these three plays on consecutive nights with matinees, see?

Gena's not a particularly ambitious woman in the trade, as it goes. Although, if she sees a good part, she'll kill herself for it, but I mean kill herself performing it, but not getting it. I mean, it's either given to her, or she'll play with the kids or do something else or go out. When Gena read the plays she said, "Noone could do this every night!" She feared they would take her to a sanitarium if she became that keyed up over a long period of time. So then I said, well, all right, let's try to make it a movie.

I can't just go out and make what I want. I have to go through a whole big process of crap, talking to people, proving to them that whatever we are going to do is going to make money. If I can prove to them that my intentions are to make money, then they will let me make any film I want. But it becomes increasingly more difficult to tell them that since I'm not concerned with making money.

You con people and you lie to them. You try to keep a little part of yourself when somebody says to you, "You figure it's the greatest picture ever made?" You try to keep a little part of yourself alive.

So I went through all the processes of calling people in Wisconsin and Idaho and, you know, big industrialists, and trying to find out how to raise the money. And we couldn't raise anything, not anything!

Gena tells everyone it's hard to live with me because there is nothing she can say that I don't write down. I see Gena around the house and with the kids and I tape record what I see. I do tape record things and exaggerate them and blow them up and the incidents are not the same. I mean, I'm not a writer at all! I just record what I hear. As prattle. What people are concerned with in a day's living. I have a good ear for prattle. Every line in your life is eaten up by the movies you do.

The preparations for the scripts I've written are really long, hard intense studies. I don't just enter into a film and say, "That's the film we're going to do." I think, "Why make it?" For a long time. I think, "Well, could the people be themselves, does this really happen to people, do they really dream this, do they think this?"

There were weeks of wrestling to get the script right. I knew hard-hat workers like Nick, and Gena knew women like Mabel, and although I wrote everything myself, we would discuss lines and situations with Peter Falk, to get his opinion, to see if he thought they were really true, really honest. The actors discussed the clothes, the characters would be wearing, the influence of money on their lives, the lives of the children, why they sleep on the ground floor, etc.

Everything was discussed, nothing came from me alone. We write a lot of things that aren't in the movie, as background. So that when we got to the scene, you might rewrite on the spot, but we might have already gone in three, four, five, seven, eight, nineteen different versions of the scene.

In replacing narrative, you need an idea. What you do is take an idea that you have about a situation that seems as normal as everyday life so the audience doesn't see the idea. So it doesn't show. Of course the idea itself has to be good. It really has to be first-rate. And the idea in A Woman Under the Influence was a concept of how much you have to pay for love. That's kind of pretentious but I was interested in it. And I didn't know how to do it, and none of the other people knew how either, so we had to work extremely hard.

I knew that love created at once great moments of beauty and that on the other hand it makes you a prisoner. It just seems to me that women are alone and they are made prisoner by their own love. If they commit to something then they have committed to it and it's a torture. And it's true. I mean, I see it in my relationship to Gena. Within such a system, men have always been in a more favorable position — they are allowed to test themselves against the rest of the world since they are in contact with it. But I feel it too. A man feels that also. And nobody knows how to handle it. Nobody knows how to handle it.

There's a very small part of all of us that has any kind of value. I think there's a small part of us that says we'd like to say something better than what is usually said, on the purest level. And the rest of it is con-men and struggling people just like everyone else — where you're constantly humiliated and go through life, even if you're not humiliated, thinking you are.

And then you get very lucky and you meet a group of creative people that are very much like you who are locked up in their own selves, trying to come out, trying in some way to express something that is very personal to them.

When Gena was committed by Peter and she went to an institution, and as the film says, six months later she comes out — I would have thought that she would be so hostile against her husband. But she comes in the house and she never even acknowledges his presence. She's only considering her children.

And we did a take, and I thought, "Should I stop this? I mean, she never even looked at Peter." She walks in the house and everyone greets her and she never looks at her husband — I mean, she looks at him, but she never sees him, yet she's not avoiding him. And I thought, well, that's the defenseless thing carrying itself too far here! What are we doing?

All through that homecoming scene I was astounded by what was underneath people, what these actors had gathered in the course of this movie. And I was way behind them. I was staggered because Gena was so quiet and mild. She wasn't hostile at all. I started yelling because I thought she was acting so the audience would like her, but I was wrong. She was expressing fear, which separated her from the people she loved.

When we looked at the dailies, Gena said, "What do you think? I'm at a loss, did we go too far?" And I said, "I didn't like it, I just didn't like it at all." I mean, I found it really embarrassing to watch.

It was just such a horrible thing to do to somebody, to take her into a household with all those people after she'd been in an institution, and their inability to speak to this woman could put her right back in an institution, and yet they were speaking to her, and Gena wanted to get rid of them and at the same time not insult them. But then I thought what Gena did was like poetry. It altered the narrative of the piece. The dialogue was the same, but it really made it different. I would grow to love those scenes very, very much, but the first time I didn't.

By the time you get him to the beach — the beach scene, I think, is wonderful, and Peter is wonderful because he has absolutely no idea what he is doing there. I had the camera down there and they just started walking. I never went near them and they are walking and Peter has some lines and he says the lines and then they don't know what to do. Now I could tell them, but that would kill it. What different does it make what he does? He has to do it. I can't do it. The camera can move. It can follow, you know. So where they play that scene and what they do has to be in their own timing. And when Peter gets there at the end of the beach and he pushes the little girl down, there was a wonderful moment. I see him trying to communicate with his children. I see him trying to touch. I see him not caring.

I see so many things that developed that wouldn't have if you formalized a view of the character through your own mind and didn't allow room for interpretation. I wrote it and as soon as I wrote it I killed the writer. There is no writer because the writer can only make the actor feel insecure. I have been in a lot of movies and as soon as the writer would come on the set everyone died. Because the writer knows exactly how everyone should be played, exactly what the intentions are. But writing is one medium and film is another medium.

How satisfying did it feel to do this? Sooooooo fucking satisfying. ABBA and Fleetwood Mac are two of my favorite bands ever. It is definitely tied to my dual love for ensemble casts and the 1970s (also, harmonies and mixed gender vocals). Bergman and Cassavetes are obviously also no slouches at being total fucking geniuses.

Remember that summer that Tusk was the only CD in my car, and I just drove around Los Angeles in the fucking zone like a character in that Joan Didion novel I don't like (just checking to see if Joan Didion has google name alert filters. Hi Joan! What's it like there? Earth?) I am listening to "I Walk A Thin Line" right now, pon de Lindsey. Lindsey Buckingham's black swan was Don Henley. Stevie's was clearly Christine McVie, although there's an argument to be made for Carly Simon (Blonde swans. Blawns.)

These bands both wrote some of the greatest breakup songs of all times, killed at least four marriages, and then had to face each other on stage at night. Cassavetes and Bergman have definitely made some awesome breakup movies. Is poignancy considered a genre? Have yall heard "Sara"? That song makes me feel like I live in a Scorsese montage. It's a field recording of your heart being ripped out of your chest.

Art accurately reflects real life so rarely that when it does it sort of fucks you up. It makes you remember that the whole point is to get people in that place where they have to go "damn it's true" and that art that doesn't even try to do that is fucking bullshit. Comedy can go deeper than drama, and often does, and the desire to be taken seriously is what fucked up Woody Allen's game. Serious movies that aren't at all funny seem unrealistic because life is super fucking funny, especially when it sucks.

People make fun of all four of these artists for their earnestness. ABBA and Fleetwood Mac don't really ever get tagged as pretentious, because they made such perfect pop music, but they also go incredibly deep. Bergman and Cassavetes get called pretentious so much that it undercuts how awesome they both actually are. I'm not saying The Seventh Seal is a fucking laugh riot but Bergman isn't humorless at all.

As soon as I realized I was going to do this exercise to completion I felt the rush of having realized my purpose on this earth. I felt like Miley's bong hit. I felt the way Stevie Nicks's voice makes me fucking feel. I want to follow her down every fadeout. Making the photocollages was accepting that my internet practice has no ceilings.

You never felt the camera. You didn't know where the camera was. Only when he picked up the handheld camera, and then you knew you were being taken care of. He really made love to you. He really knew how to use a handheld.

- Ben Gazzara

In real life the screaming monologue is unusual, but it's the centerpiece of an actor's repertoire. Most interactions are less obvious. People generally put on more of a big dumb show the less they actually care, and less of a show when they care the most. Genuine reaction flares in the eyes but then most people try to cap it, because feelings like jealousy, anger and sadness are associated with embarrassment and weakness.

John Cassavetes' movies are so good because they don't point at themselves. That's how they go so deep without tipping into pretentiousness or kitsch. The emotional moments feel real because they are subtle, and most emotional moments are subtle.

Husbands explores the conflict between personal selfishness and the desire to connect. The blocking is clumsy and realistic. Watching the three characters continually reassemble themselves in the frame is fascinating. The action always feels like it just occurs. All of the sequences feel like they are in real time, and it is as excruciating to watch uncomfortable events unfold as it is pleasant to watch the long bits of improvised physical nonsense. Cassavetes goes especially extra hard on himself.

Most of the movie is closeups, a dialogue of glances between the three best friends. It's a love story about male friendships and the ways men display affection for each other. Some critics argue that male romantic friendship is the founding trope of American literature, back to Huck and Tom (Gatsby and Nick, Ishmael and Queequeg).

Male friendship fascinates me because it's not a thing I can observe firsthand without changing the dynamic. Although god knows I try. What I love about ensemble casts is that they replicate how romantic a whole friend group can be. I am so fucking bored of bromances. How hard is it to write a conversation between a man and a woman that resembles anything that happens in real life? I have conversations with men every day.

Black Swan's shortcut around writing realistic female characters was surrealistic female characters. What do women talk about alone together? What does anyone talk about? Stupid bullshit trying to make each other laugh. Songs we've been listening to a lot. Sometimes we gossip, but if I've learned anything in life it's that men gossip the most.

Husbands is so great, so rueful. It reminds me of my other favorite 1970s borderline misogynist depending on your personal feelings about whether it's a critique (I think they both definitely are) film Carnal Knowledge. I'd throw Shampoo in there. They romanticize masculinity from a standpoint of extreme cynicism. Can you romanticize a subject and critique it simultaneously? I'm not sure there's any other way to do either.

I don't believe that men are naturally worse than women. I worry a little that men might think that. They underestimate their goodness and our badness. Women are definitely not more moral or responsible at all. The most moralistic responsible people I know are all men. Men have more opportunities to abuse power, but I don't believe that women wouldn't abuse it in exactly the same ways. Ask Madonna's twenty year old boyfriend what he thinks. People with power use it to subjugate those without.

Obviously I wish there were more media depictions of how romantic female friendships are (we're working on it). I don't mean romantic like Black Swan, I mean romantic in the road-trip sense. Sismance is still a pretty small genre. Things depicting women are usually about female rivalry. Female rivalry as a media trope is way overrepresented and female friendship is super fucking underrepresented.

That is what women really love about Sex And The City. Did they ever even want to fuck the same guy once? Isn't it crazy that they maybe didn't do that plotline during the whole run of the show? When they fought, it was always over something regarding the friendship, usually Carrie semi-accidentally being an insensitive jerk. Definitely those kinds of conflicts are more common in real life than cut a bitch catfights.

I really like Mary McCarthy's novel The Group about a group of female friends from college, because I have a tight-knit group of female friends from college that I love more than anything, and I am totally curious about how people fucked in the thirties.

I can't really put into words how much I love my friends. I wouldn't even know where to start. Husbands goes without dialogue for long stretches and just relies on the characters interacting with each other, demonstrating their deep devotion to one another in the most indirect ways. It is frustrating and occasionally transcendent.

I realize this post isn't really very much about Husbands, but I can't possibly improve on Husbands. I never have too much to say about things I just love, and I am always seeking things that will make me want to stop talking. I guess my articles are never really about the thing they're supposed to be about, and I improvise. There is a four and a half hour version I would like to see that Ben Gazzara says is his favorite cut.

Cassavetes initially cut Husbands around Ben Gazzara, then made other cuts where he and Peter Falk were the principal lead, before ending up with the final cut where they are all represented equally. Thinking about your own life from the point of view of your closest friends will make you go blind. It's hard enough just being yourself.